Re: Last Call: <draft-ietf-6man-rfc1981bis-04.txt> (Path MTU Discovery for IP version 6) to Internet Standard

[Fernando Gont <[e-mail]>]

On 02/07/2017 05:06 PM, [e-mail] wrote:
>
>>> Could you expand on your view of how this pertains to advancing
>>> RFC1981?
>>> 
>> It's called last call input. My input is that this document needs
>> to be more realistic in noting that, for all intents, ICMP-based
>> MTU discovery isn't viable and that other methods need to be
>> *expected*, not just that they're available.
> 
> Right, but if you are correct that ICMP-based MTU discovery is not
> viable then this document should not be advanced. At the same time
> for many protocols we have nothing else. An operator can break any
> protocol if that's their policy. And that's the breakage we're
> talking about here, not any issues with the protocol specification.
> 
> There is a philosophical aspect of this. (Which I'm not the best
> person to represent as I skipped my University studies in philosophy
> and used the student loan to buy a motorcycle... (and only read the
> art of motorcycle maintenance years later) ) This is a tussle. The
> IETF specifies protocols under the assumption that operators treat
> those protocols largely as specified. The 5-10% failure of PMTUD
> messages may be caused by misconfiguration, misunderstanding or
> mis-intent... Many of our protocols are suffering from the same fate.
> Should the IETF adjust all its protocols to be as middlebox friendly
> as possible? You can make this argument about IPv6 fragments, any
> packet with IPv6 extension headers, IPv4 fragments. Or anything but
> TCP port 443/80 and UDP port 53 for that matter. Are we as the IETF
> going to continue standardising protocols to work as best as they
> possible can, ignoring protocol abuse, or are we going to bend over
> and do whatever it takes to make it work for those 5-10% who've
> actively broken the protocol? What about the 90-90% where the
> protocols work as expected?

There are two things to note here:

1) the folk breaking PMTUD is probably not the guy suffering from that
breakage. So the had that "bad-hevaed" nodes hurt the "well behaved"
nodes (i.e., you cannot claim "you're shooting your own foot).

2) Being an engineering group I would expect our protocols to work in
the real world -- that's the point of engineering: solving problems.  At
the end of the day, you can build stuff that works, or complain that way
too many people are doing dumb things (for some meaning of "dumb"). --
But the later will not make protocols work, nor solve problems.

In that sense, I agree with Joe, and Randy Bush here.

Thanks,
-- 
Fernando Gont
SI6 Networks
e-mail: [e-mail]
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